Thursday, December 31, 2015

Today I am writing this final blog post for the year 2015, Few more hours left to step in to the New Year 2016. My advanced New Year Wishes to you all in first place. I started blogging from the year 2013 and crossed 3 successful New years on this blogging journey, Its always good to look back and see how things were, how things are now and what's coming in the mere future and get prepared for a fresh start.

This year 2015 was a great year for me, starting from the day one, I was recognized by Microsoft for my Community contributions and honored with the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Awardfor my expertise Office 365 and now a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services after the new Award restructuring, which further expanded my expertise including my Technical Interests. I felt blissful to get listed among one of the Top Technical Experts in the Global Community. Being a Microsoft MVP is not just an honor its a boon for me to do more to the community and help others to know more about current Technology happenings in the world of Microsoft and beyond in a more sophisticated way in this agile World, where you can see changes occur by every second at a rapid rate.

This year is quite special for Microsoft, where we had more innovations and announcements than ever before inline with their Mobile First, Cloud First Strategy.

Lets get ready to explore some of the key happenings in the world of Microsoft this year 2015, I am making this post bit simple for readers by curating some key blog posts that includes significant announcements from Microsoft and few other vital resources from my collection this year in a single window for your ease of review. I would still recommend readers to go through all the posts in my blog and other essential blogs available in the global community.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Office 365 learning gets advanced everyday as and when a new feature gets introduced in to the Service. Office 365 learning resources available from Microsoft Virtual Academy is not just limited to migration and best practices, its beyond the traditional learning and introduces you to the latest innovations from Microsoft.

If you are an Office 365 Administrator, or an IT Pro working on Office 365, then these video courses are essential for you to stay updated with latest innovation and to learn more about Office 365.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Customers migrating to Office 365 often asks this question,what happens to my data after my organization’s Office 365 subscription ends? Many answers revolves around this topic and to answer this essential question Microsoft team published a recent EHLO Blog post and explains Office 365 Tenant Lifecycle.

Be sure to read this blog post and the referenced Office 365 Subscription Lifecycle documentation.

Microsoft team has announced the availability of new Beta Exams, these exams are free for a limited period of time using the beta codes provided and only limited seats are available for free. If your interested register soon. Also beta codes are not applicable for countries like Turkey, Pakistan, India, China, Vietnam. If you belong to one of these countries you can still write this exam at the regular price and no second shot is applicable on beta exams as with other generally available exams.

Since these exams are in beta as stated there is no Instructor led training or practice tests available, you can refer the Skills Measured section for each exam and take pointers from there and prepare for the Exam with the available resources from Microsoft like, TechNet, Microsoft Virtual Academy, Microsoft Azure Blog, Microsoft Servers and Tools Blogs and few other Technical blogs available in general from the community.Update:

Friday, December 18, 2015

I wrote a blog postlast year February referencing MVP Tony Redmond's blog post on End of Life for IE8 browser and suggested to upgrade to IE11. Also I had updated that article referencing Redmond magazine blog post which points to IE Team Blog post "Stay up-to-date with Internet Explorer" explaining the support policy for IE browsers.

As stated in the IE Team blog post, "After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates" Upgrading to IE 11 now becomes mandatory as we are near to the deadline and Microsoft team recently published a knowledge base article on the new "End of Life" upgrade notification feature that will be delivered in the January 12, 2016, cumulative security update.

As stated in the article if you have not yet upgraded to IE11, you can disable the notifications temporarily and plan for a upgrade soon.

Office 365 System requirements page is updated to reflect the same,

"Beginning January 12, 2016, we are implementing changes across Office 365 workloads, which will result in a significantly diminished experience for Office 365 users on Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9.”

Microsoft recommends the usage of current or immediately previous version of Internet Explorer; the current version of Microsoft Edge, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox as supported web clients and if the browser clients are legacy there will see diminished performance.

If your Organization is still using Legacy IE browsers, you can obtain the browser usage report from Office 365 portal as a start, Generate the complete report to identify full set of users by connecting to Office 365 service using remote PowerShell as explained in the below article.

Azure AD is expanding rapidly with new innovations on the fly, Bringing everything under one roof is always challenging and to make things ease Azure AD team has started a new series of posts called "The Azure AD Mailbag". This Series will provide answers for questions that are regularly received from customers on Azure AD by members of Microsoft Customer Success team.

Be sure to read the currently available posts on this series from AD Team blog.

Office 365 Protection Center includes all the same great features available in the Compliance Center with a new enhanced experience. Also we will start seeing the Office 365 security features, such as ATP, DLP and MDM, in the Protection Center during the first half of 2016.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Project Management plays a key role in every Organization, and now its time for us to utilize a simple but effective project management tool called "Planner" with Office 365. Office 365 Planner is available in public preview for First release customers and you can start using planner and share your feedback and suggestions through Uservoice.

Be sure to test the updates in your lab environment and plan for production, Customers using Hybrid deployment and Exchange Online Archiving are required to deploy the most current or the prior Cumulative/Update Rollup release.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Microsoft team published planning Tools for Lync 2010/2013 deployments and also we do have few other designer tools available from experts in the community, you can access my earlier blog post on this topic here. Its now time for the Skype for Business 2015, This new Planning Tool provides prescriptive guidance to get you started with planning your topology.

Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync with Apple iOS devices are not a good combination till date and still end up with new issues overtime. We all know that they both have a long history on this topic. Even with the new iOS 9.x release few issues reported globally with EAS and Microsoft team has updated their Current issues article to reflect this.

Once an issue becomes a known issue, Microsoft support will point you to the above said articles, but convincing our users to accept this is still painful. Though we educate them to accept or update meetings only from their outlook client as a best practice, most of them are mobile users and this is not much ideal in today's World. So they finally end up creating new issues, which results in more support cases to either Corporate IT or Microsoft support teams.

After the release of newMicrosoft Outlook for iOS, Microsoft Support team is giving this a workaround till they resolve the actual issue.

Noting seems straight forward for the above said issues in the current update and still we need to wait for these to get addressed with the next build from Apple and also from Microsoft side, if a fix needs to be applied on their end.

Now, not only our EAS is impacted, one more new issue has hit the MDM Space with these new iOS devices

Most Organizations utilize either EAS or MDM for managing their mobile users, With the latest innovations and threats in today's mobile world, most Organizations are using a strong MDM solution to manage their mobility workforce to ensure that their corporate data is Secure. Creates polices for the devices that are accessing the corporate resources from anywhere in the world and make them compliant inline with their IS policy and manage them effectively.

If you are utilizing Microsoft Intune as your MDM solution and your users are using iOS 9.2 devices then you are hit by the new issue explained in the below Intune Blog post,

Also the article states that this issue is affecting other MDM providers too and they are working with Apple support to address this issue.Defer upgrading to iOS 9.2 for managed devices is provided as the current workaround.

Fixing these issues is always painful, because if we upgrade to a new iOS version for addressing an existing issue, it breaks the other working services and creates a new one.

Ensure that your users are made aware about these current issues periodically and educate them not to flood your IT support team with these known issues, reducing these cases creates a better support experience to handle other issues inside your environment timely.

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

New Office 365 E5 offering went live recently with lot of new features added to the service and to know what's new with this offering, get yourself registered to the upcoming Microsoft webcast Event "Office 365 E5 Launch" this Friday, 11 Dec 2015, 10.00 AM PT or the next 18 Dec 2015.

During this Office 365 E5 launch webcast, a Microsoft TS2 expert will provide you with an overview on the new offering and discuss the best options available to build your successful Office 365 E5 practice.

In this webcast you will:

Gain an overview on Office 365 E5 plan features that include – advanced security, analytics for eDiscovery with secure attachments/URLs with advanced threat protection and access control using Power BI Pro and Delve analytics, machine learning.

Understand how cloud PBX and PSTN conferencing will work as part of this new solution.

Learn the fundamentals of building a profitable Office 365 E5 practice.

Study the Office 365 E3 pricing and licensing models.

Understand your target customers and learn about partner incentives designed to help you close deals.

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

Office 365 E5 plan was announced earlier this July 2015, As stated in the Official announcement Microsoft planned to release E5 by the end if this calendar year, as stated in this ZDNET post today is the day "December 1, 2015" for its general availability to global customers. Now you can buy E5 from your Office 365 portal and enjoy the latest innovations from Microsoft and add more value to your Enterprise.

Once you Navigate to your existing Subscription page in Office 365 portal and select to add additional subscription, you can see the new "Office 365 Enterprise E5 without PSTN Conferencing" plan now available, You can choose to pay per month or Annually.

As stated in the below referenced Official blog post PSTN Conferencing is available only in US and will be available later to other regions.

Each License costs $35 per user/month and you can assign few licenses to your tenant to explore the new features and switch plans for appropriate users in the mere future as needed.

Microsoft team started to introduce new features available in E5 one after the other in the recent past and made significant announcements through Office blogs post and yesterday blog post was more significant and concludes these announcements and puts things in action.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Microsoft launched the new PowerApps, an enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps with your team on any device in minutes. And PowerApps helps anyone in your organization unlock new business agility.

After the launch of Office 365 Groupsmost Organizations started their transition from traditional Distribution Groups to new Office 365 Groups. Microsoft team started to introduce new innovations to Office 365 Groups on the move and extended their Roadmap, Office 365 Groups has evolved from it initial stages and now have tighter integration capabilities with multiple Microsoft product line providing more enhanced features than ever before. Administrating Office 365 groups is now simplified with rich set of granular controls for management.

To know things in a nutshell, review the new Microsoft Ignite Australia 2015 session by Christophe Fiessinger MSFT.

Recently Microsoft came up with the plan of Automatic creation of Direct reports groups in outlook, and due to feedback received from Customers around the world, instead of making this update to roll-out globally, now this update applies to Customers that have received either message center post MC94808 or message center post MC98024.

Long waited Automated Expiration for Office 365 Groups is now available in public preview. With this new feature you can set an expiration timeframe for any Office 365 group you choose. Once that timeframe is set, owners of any groups set to expire will be asked to renew them if they still need them. Groups that aren’t renewed will be deleted. And using the “Soft-delete of groups” feature, any group that was not meant to be deleted can be restored within 30 days by the group owners.Note: The Office 365 groups expiration feature is available in public preview for Azure AD Premium customers. This feature will require Azure AD Premium License when it GAs.

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Microsoft Ignite Australia 2015conference, completed earlier this Month and now the session videos are available on demand in Channel 9. Lot of great stuff from Microsoft on their latest innovations sparking towards the future of IT.

Microsoft team recently released the new Customer Security Considerations (CSC) workbook as an addition to the rich set of available resources for Information Security and Compliance. The CSC workbook is designed to provide you with information on key security and compliance features to consider when adopting, deploying and managing Office 365.

You can access the Office 365 Service Trust Portal and Select Trust Documents and download the workbook and the usage guide.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Microsoft Azure AD Application Proxy team recently published a Whitepaper, for troubleshooting Azure AD application proxy. This acts as a complete guide and provides full overview of all the capabilities around Application Proxy troubleshooting

Last week was quite a great week for Office 365, Microsoft team made various new significant announcements for Office 365 and also few more on other related platforms like Azure, Enterprise Mobility, SharePoint and Skype for Business.

This post is written to list out the Top 5 announcements made last week for Office 365

Office 2013 modern authentication public preview program got renamed to the Office 365 modern authentication public preview. Also now Modern authentication for Office 2013/2016 Windows client are now GA.

Microsoft Team announced new Security and Compliance capabilities to Office 365, including Advanced Threat Protection, Customer Lockbox and Advanced eDiscovery, which integrates Equivio. Customer Lockbox and Advanced eDiscovery will be available for customers to purchase starting December 1, 2015.

Finally,Enforcing Office 365 identity in Yammer is now available and Administrators can configure federated identity in Office 365 to achieve single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for all services in Office 365, which includes Yammer. Also Microsot team is removing the Yammer SSO and directory synchronization (DSync) tools, starting December 1, 2016.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Microsoft is making innovations on the fly, day by day, and stay to update with all of these innovations are quite challenging, By accepting consisting feedback from customers and responding to their queries Microsoft team has over come this challenge and enhanced the adoption ratio.

Office 365 is one key area, where these fore said innovations are occurring at a rapid rate and to get feedback from customers "Office 365 User Voice" forum was launched. We could see lot of feedback posts and discussions are now available on various topics and I wrote this post today to bring this to readers attention. If you have not come across this yet, Its time for you to utilize the same and share your feedback to Microsoft.

In Today's cloud connected world, its essential to know how to move your workloads to cloud and also allow users to utilize the benefits of latest technology innovations, without compromising security and this e-Book is worth reading to know more on this topic and begin your journey with Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).

Update:

I recently came across few more vital resources on the topic and referenced below for your reading as an add-on read.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

I am writing this post today to point you to the latest Exchange Team blog post, explains how to overcome throttling issues when running PowerShell cmdlets for large numbers of users in Office 365.

Its quite common that we generate reports or apply changes to large number of users in Office 365 as a part of Operations and need to wait for hours to get the results. We all know about the throttling limits that exist with Office 365 and sometime the script breaks and makes us to start from the scratch. Finally, Microsoft team published a blog post to overcome this issue.

By using the the help of Script blocks and Invoke-command cmdlet we can construct PowerShell Scripts that returns the required data without much issues on time and also a great PowerShell script "Start-RobustCloudCommand script" is shared to us that makes our job a lot easier.

More information is available in the below EHLO blog post,

Review here: Running PowerShell cmdlets for large numbers of users in Office 365

I have personally used this script for a recent requirement to disable clutter for a large set of users and it did worked well.

Office 365 Administration mainly relies on the Admin Center and PowerShell, When Managing Office 365 via the Admin Center its is quite complicated as new features added day by day the Admin Center is now having various options made available in different areas and we need to navigate to multiple locations to manage things related to a single task. Also when it comes to reporting we require some additional innovation from Microsoft which can make the reporting lot easier and effective which suits our needs and we don't require to invest on 3rd party providers.

To address the above said needs Microsoft team is revamping the Admin Center with new UI and enhancements which makes the Administrative experience a lot more easier and also new reporting capabilities are added including new usage reports across Office 365 workloads. Office 365 Admin Center Previewgets this soon and also upcoming Power BI Content Pack for Office 365admins is a new add-on that will take the reporting capabilities to next level.

Office 365 Admin app also gets new features added to make administration a lot easier on the go, where ever you are with few clicks on your mobile.

PowerShell is the next reliable Administrative tool to manage Office 365 workloads, Automation relies here to make your management experience a lot easier, Microsoft team is giving additional guidance and resources to this key area along with the above said innovations.

All of this is covered with real time demo in the recent Microsoft Mechanics video series by Lawrence Chiu, Sr.Product Manager, Office 365

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Skype for Business Server 2015 is gaining momentum and multiple customers started to adopt or migrate to the latest Microsoft communication platform. If you are currently working on a new roll-out or working on a migration project, then this Microsoft Virtual Academy course is an essential resource to your learning road-map and also assisting you in preparing for the latest Microsoft Exam 70-334 ("Core Solutions of Microsoft Skype for Business 2015")

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Identity management is the key for every Organization, Microsoft Azure AD is enhanced in such away that it addresses every need of the customers with advanced set new features and innovations occur rapidly day by day.When you extend your On premises AD infrastructure to the cloud and deploy an Hybrid model you can manage and take advantage of both the AD environment seamlessly.

Microsoft team published the below Whitepapers for ease of understanding of various rich features a available with Azure AD and the benefit you will get when you extend or bridge your On premises to the cloud.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Check out the latest Office Blogs post for the day, Its the new learning video series for Skype for Business for IT Pros powered by Skype Meeting Broadcast. This is a great resource added to the product learning and all you need to do is to join the the Skype for Business IT Proyammer community.

Also I would recommend that, you can Join the Office 365 Network and search for your relevant group and join the technical discussion to gain more insight on the product and enhance your technical skills and also a key place to share your queries for answers and vice versa.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Monitoring server performance and health is quite critical, Microsoft Skype for Business server 2015 has an in-built management tool called Statistics Manager for Skype for Business Server 2015, a powerful tool that allows you to view Skype for Business Server health and performance data in real time.

Microsoft team launched Office Garage series quite some time before to provide real-time demo videos of latest Microsoft innovations in Office 365 and later it got renamed to Office Mechanics and covered a vast majority of topics from Office Server and services product line, to further expand this with additional technologies, a new unified name has been chosen which addresses everything this show will be hosting as "Microsoft Mechanics".

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Microsoft team recently released the public preview of Modern Authentication to the Azure Active Directory PowerShell Module, Now this new update removes the dependency of Microsoft Online Services Sign-In assistant and utilizes the new modern authentication model usingActive Directory Authentication Library (ADAL).

You can review the Connect site for more updates, this includes changes to the way we connect to the service along with other enhancements etc.